Eight rules for a successful UX improvement project

Some of you might know that we are currently working on expanding the existing topic “enterprise UX strategy” within the SAP EA Explorer (formerly SAP UX Explorer). During this process we have already collected several general statements and hints that ended up for now in what we call “the eight rules for a successful UX improvement project”.

As I’m always curious about your feedback for further improvements, I wanted to share this piece of content early enough. So, here it is. 🙂

You might think you know your users. But you can only understand their working environment once you have watched them working and listened to their concerns. As a result: Keep your users at the center of all your activities (for example with user research and design thinking methods).

2. Enjoy feedback
You might be scared by complaints and issues that you cannot tackle. But if you don’t ask, you will miss a lot of complains and issues that you CAN solve. AND: Your user will honor the improvements you are going to provide, even if they does not address all issues in the first place.

Surveys have shown that 38% of customers* focus directly on developing their own applications and thus follow the path with probably the highest investment. It turns out that many customers are not aware of the UX improvement assets in their existing SAP environment and SAP license, which could potentially improve their user experience with lower effort.

5. Focus on a few users first
You will need some time to understand your user’s environment and how your planned improvements will impact them. Identify small groups of users who share the same usage pattern, issues and complaints. Start improving these small groups first, and extend the reach of positive results to other users in a sub–sequent step.

6. Prove solutions, not technologies
Do not limit your proof-of-concepts to just certain technologies. Positive UX improvements are often driven by a combination of multiple technologies together with business-related content or configuration. As a result: Make sure that you have understood the relationship between technologies and other complementary topics that you need in order to build valuable solutions to test.

7. Focus on a coherent user experience
Always try to avoid a mix of UI technologies for one user. In scenarios where this is not possible, try to optimize the mix by harmonizing the visual appearance (with same SAP standard themes or with UI theme designer for example). While new applications look great and are intuitive, running them in a mix with classic applications can result in a bad overall user experience. You always need to consider the pros and cons of new functions and features vs. a coherent user experience. With this in mind, you might keep a user with an “older” version of an application in order to ensure better coherence. Or you might prefer a less coherent user experience over a new function.

The best results improving your user experience can be reached by using a well-structured approach and a good UX strategy that considers your existing strategies (for example IT strategy, business strategy) and boundaries (security rules for instance). This UX strategy defines your overall UX improvement vision, mission and key performance indicators (KPIs) and builds the starting point for any UX improvement project.